The Holy City Read Online Free PDF

of her, she was like something that might have emerged from the sixties herself, with her scarves and her bangles and her flappy Birkenstock sandals.
    â€” You stupid black fucker! was, in fact, what I had said.
    I can’t even remember what she had said to me to precipitate that reaction — what her actual question had been, I mean. But I know it had something to do with Ethel Baird. As a matter of fact, it was all she seemed to want to talk about. Ethel Baird, or ‘the music teacher’, as she preferred to call her.
    â€” Yes, all of that is fine, Mr McCool, she would say, usually after I’d been rabbiting on for ages, but can we talk about the music teacher, please?
    â€” What else can you say about her? I replied. She was liked by everyone, kept herself to herself all the time. Was regarded by everyone as the almost perfect Protestant. ‘The quality’, they called her. ‘Dearest Ethel,’ they’d say, ‘is the quality.’
    â€” The quality?
    It soon became obvious that she didn’t have a clue. Pandit was hopelessly out of her depth.
    Nonetheless, I did my best to explain:
    â€” Upper crust. Respected. Well-off, but not showy, you know, Meera?
    Then she looks at me in this funny kind of way and changes the subject all of a sudden.
    â€” Why did you go there after you’d been to the greenhouse?
    â€” I wanted her to read to me, I said.
    â€” Read to you?
    â€” Yes, I said, read: and maybe sing a little hymn.
    â€” Sing a — what? A hymn?
    â€” Yes, I said, ‘Abide With Me’.
    â€” ‘Abide With Me’?
    Of course with the way she was looking at me I might have said it was ‘Delaney’s fucking Donkey’ I’d wanted.
    Then she said:
    â€” Well then, Chris, is there anything else you’d like to say about that time? About the nineteen sixties: about how you were feeling, what you might have been expecting from life? And this boy that you mentioned, this Marcus Otoyo —
    â€” Niggers, Meera, I said, they’re all the same. You can’t trust any of them. They’re even worse than Catholics.
    When I saw her reaction then, I had to interject immediately:
    â€” Ha ha, Meera, that was just a joke! Marcus Otoyo was an excellent fellow! Absolutely nothing wrong with him at all!
    She didn’t make any response to this, just seemed kind of sullen before continuing on.
    â€” Now, you say that in your village, this town you call Ballymore, is it?
    â€” Cullymore, I corrected.
    I was so irritated that, after all my efforts, in spite of all the patience I’d demonstrated, she’d gone and forgotten the town’s name again. That was the third or fourth time she’d done it. It couldn’t have been all that difficult to remember, I kept thinking. So now, I’m afraid, it was my turn to besullen. I didn’t say anything for quite a long time. I kind of felt too, mainly on account of the way she was staring at me, some kind of an implication that for purposes entirely my own I’d been withholding certain facts from her. Facts pertaining to Marcus Otoyo, in particular.
    I decided to clear the air once and for all.
    â€” Look here, Meera, I began — with admirable restraint, I would have to insist, in the circumstances. It seems to me that these are the verifiable facts. Yes, I admired Marcus quite a lot. Indeed, at times, I think I might have even wanted to
be
Marcus Otoyo. Certainly to be as saintly as him: to experience the same overpowering depth of emotion to which he had access. Share in that celestial otherworldly transcendence. Do you know what I mean? To experience that
aura.
Which one exudes when they say one’s in love.
    â€” In love? she said quizzically.
    â€” Yes, in love, I said, abiding in that holiest of cities. The most ancient place: the city of the open heart. It’s so sacred, Meera. The truest holiness of which we mortals are capable. That’s